The devil is in the detail … the National.
Photograph: Graham MacIndoe

Over the decades, artists have made concept albums about everything from the state of Michigan to the life of Gaudí to the Ravenskill Rebel Militia’s revolt against the rule of Emperor Nafaryus of the dystopian Great Northern Empire of the Americas in 2285 (US prog-metal band Dream Theater’s 2016 quadruple album The Astonishing, if you’ve got two hours and 10 minutes to spare). But few artists have alighted on a topic quite as tricky as that which drives the National’s seventh studio album. Virtually every song on Sleep Well Beast concerns itself with the bleak minutiae of middle age: feelings of regret, relationships becoming careworn and – especially – unignorable cracks appearing in a marriage.

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It’s not even a divorce album in the vein of Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks or Björk’s Vulnicura. Nothing as dramatic as that. It deals not in fury and vengeance, but passing moments of eye-rolling frustration and sighing ennui; not in cataclysmic, rupturing rows but grumbling discontent and odd spasms of self-flagellation; not in catastrophic descents into alcoholism or substance abuse, but vague worries about boozing and smoking weed, not least the fact that they’re not leavening life’s load in the way they once did. “Let’s just get high enough to see our problems,” suggests a song called Day I Die; “nothing I do makes me feel different,” complains I’ll Still Destroy You.

These are the kind of subjects that inform umpteen novels but not many rock or pop songs, and you can see why. The emotions involved are pretty universal and potent but they’re also complex and nuanced, hard to distill into four minutes and a few verses without seeming inconsequential or self-indulgent: why have you written a song about this? In comparison, relating the saga of the Ravenskill Rebel Militia’s revolt against Emperor Nafaryus in 2285 looks like a doddle.

So it’s to the immense credit of the National’s frontman Matt Berninger and his co-writer Carin Besser (who, intriguingly, also happens to be his wife), that the listener to Sleep Well Beast never feels as if they’ve been cornered at a party by an over-sharer keen to fill you in on their many woes. Berninger and Besser are very good at both summoning evocative images – the faded childhood memory of “your mother’s arms when she was young and sunburned in the 80s” – and in hitting a very realistic, muted tone, amplified by Berninger’s understated baritone voice. The songs on Sleep Well Beast are stuffed with lines that sound like they would be muttered under the breath in real life, whether they’re dealing with helpless despair at the state of the world – “I’m at a loss, I’m at a loss, I’m losing grip, the fabric’s ripped,” complains the title track – or with more domestic matters. “Goodbyes always take us half an hour,” complains the narrator of Nobody Else Will Be There on leaving a party. “Can’t we just go home?”

Nuanced, understated, restrained: you could apply the same adjectives to much of the music here, which turns out to be rather more of a mixed blessing. There are moments when listening to Sleep Well Beast’s preponderance of stately, atmospheric ballads, flecked with delicate electronics or subtle orchestration, can feel not unlike watching a long, moody, critically acclaimed film drama, possibly starring Casey Affleck: you find yourself simultaneously applauding its elegance and the evident thought and craftsmanship that went into making it, while quietly wishing it would get a move on.

When it does, it’s fantastic. The psychedelic distorted guitar churn of Turtleneck; the fluttering, disorienting I’ll Still Destroy You – a song on which the oft-deployed line about the National being a kind of American analogue to Radiohead makes a kind of sense – and, particularly, the single The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness, a song that feels kaleidoscopic and in contrast to the National’s more usual tendency to shade their music in monochrome, momentarily shifting the mood away from claustrophobic gloom. The latter crams a lot into four minutes – twinkling synthesisers, a soaring pop chorus, spasmodic retorts of fuzz guitar, a stinging solo, an appealingly ungainly take on a funk breakbeat – and sees a band who deal largely in muted delicacy forgetting themselves for a moment and letting go. For all Sleep Well Beast’s considerable and undoubted strengths, it is hard not to wish they’d let go just a little more often.